Social network analysis (SNA) is a technique used to study the interactions between individuals in
a community. Unlike other approaches such as content analysis for in-depth exploration of dialogue,
or quantification of messages for frequency estimation[...], social network analysis focuses on the
patterns of collective interaction and relationships among actors in the network [...].

Social network analysis (SNA) is a discipline of social science that seeks to explain social phenomena through a structural interpretation of human interaction both as a theory and a methodology (Wellman 1997). SNA assumes a basic graph representation where individuals (actors) are characterized by nodes, and the relationships (ties) they form with each other are edges between these nodes. This graph may be undirected, assuming that all social relationships are reciprocal, or directed, where each interaction describes a one-way association between two people. The degree of any node is defined as the number of associates that node has; in the case of undirected graphs, the degree is separated into in-degree (links in) and out-degree (links out).

Bemerkungen

Network analysis is well suited for the study of weblogs as many of the social
relationships between weblog authors are explicitly stated in the form of hypertext links.
Webloggers have posited their own interpretation of popularity and influence based on
the number of links a weblog has in various link aggregation systems. Many webloggers
use the total number of links to their site to evaluate the effectiveness of their writing.